Florida's self-proclaimed oldest living private eye, Gladdy Gold, and her friends return home to find a bank robber taunting her detective agency--and a murderer lurking at her retirement community. Original.

After being widowed at a young age with three small children, Rita Lakin began an extensive writing career, which has included staff writing on television programs such as Peyton Place, Mod Squad, Dynasty, and Strong Medicine, as well as creating original series such as The Rookies. She has won an Edgar Allen Poe award for her screenwriting, as well as receiving several other award nominations, and her two original theatrical plays, No Language But a Cry and Saturday Night at Grossingers, are still being produced around the country.

Chapter One


Home

The airport van pulls up between the Phase Two buildings of our Lanai Gardens condominium complex. It's a mild September evening with just a bit of drizzle coming down. I'm home at last.
I sigh happily, getting out of the van. We are back from New York and I'm so glad to be on home ground again. At the same moment I wonder—where will we all go from here?

The girls and Jack pile out. I call them girls although there's not one of them under 73—my sister, Evvie, and our three friends, Bella, Sophie, and Ida. They're also my partners in our three-month-old private eye business.

My on-again-off-again boyfriend Jack Langford, now definitely on for good, graciously pays the van driver, since the girls manage to fumble through their purses long enough, with sheepish smiles, for Jack to take up the slack. He's immediately commandeered into lugging suitcases for each one of them. Suddenly my girls are helpless? Next year's birthday presents should be smelling salts in case they decide to take up fainting. But Jack good-naturedly carries Bella's bags, along with my sister Evvie's, up the elevator in the P building, to their second-floor apartments. Then he's down again and racing across the courtyard to schlep Sophie's and Ida's things up to the third floor of building Q. The girls are always one step in front of him, rushing to unlock their doors—their idea of being helpful.

I wait downstairs for the troop movements to cease. I can foresee that there will have to be some rules and regulations as to how much they use and abuse my guy now that we are officially an item. What a relief that the girls are finally happy about our relationship, after fighting it for so long. Or are they? We shall see.

Tiny Bella is all atwitter. "It's so nice to have a man around the house," she trills off-key, hanging over her balcony and waving down to me.

"I could get used to it," Sophie calls out from across the way, patting her skirt down, trying to smooth the creases out of her lime-green velour traveling outfit as Jack lugs her stuff into her apartment.

Ida insists on carrying one of her own bags, so she picks up her small carry-on. "I'm not helpless. Yet," she tells Jack as she grudgingly allows him to wheel the other case—which, from the way it is listing to one side, looks like she packed an elephant inside.

Some of our neighbors stick their heads out to see what's going on. Not a surprise. They always stick their noses into anything anyone does at any given moment. Newlyweds Tessie and Sol Spankowitz pop out of Tessie's apartment on the second floor of Q. Is it my imagination? The reluctant husband, Sol, looks like he shrank since he got married. Not like the Sol we knew as The Peeper, who scared all the women with his lecherous snooping. Super-sized Tessie looms over him, eating pistachio ice cream from a gallon carton.

Naturally Mr. Know-it-all, Hy Binder, appears in a flash, on the second floor balcony of P. And right behind him is his parrot. I mean his wife, Lola.

"Look who's finally blown back into town," he calls out. "So how was the Big Apple? Anybody get mugged?"

"Yeah," mimics Lola, "anybody get mugged?"

Bella, standing two doors away, beams at the two of them. "No, but we were in a parade and got a medal. We had a fabulous time."

Sophie has to chime in, calling across, "And look who we met up with in New York. Our very own Jackie."

Uh-oh, here they go. My entire life will now be spilled out of the girls' eager mouths into our neighbors' ever-inquiring minds. But what can I do? I love them even though sometimes I want to paste duct tape across their lips.

Years ago, our husbands all dead—or in Evvie's case, divorced—we formed a new family unit sworn to care for one another th

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Excerpted from Getting Old Is a Disaster by Rita Lakin
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